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Tag Archives: Keiichi Tsuchiya

Designer Jon Sibal posted this video on his Facebook page for Throwback Thursday. It’s footage of a young Keiichi Tsuchiya racing the Advan Porshce 964 Turbo in the Sugo round of the 1994 Japanese Grand Touring Championship (JGTC). There’s a pretty eclectic mix of cars on the starting grid including a Ferrari F40, R32 Skylines, Supras and RX-7’s. I believe Tsuchiya-san is racing with his mentor who eventually became his team principal at the ARTA NSX team.

Hot Version just released this video of a test and tune session of Keiichi Tsuchiya’s personal AE86 which is used as the 200 horsepower class Touge Monster on Hot Version’s Touge Challenge series. The car used to be tuned exclusively by Sakurai-san of Toyota Racing Development who unfortunately passed away recently. Now Tec-Arts has taken over working on the car. They have plenty of experience from regularly campaigning a successful car in the revived AE86 N2 racing series. Tsuchiya-san wanted more displacement so they built him a 20v 7AG using a 7AG crank, custom rods and AE101 silvertop pistons. They also sourced some custom camshafts after discovering Sakurai-san had been making power on the stock cams. The first three minutes of this video is from the Tec-Arts shop during the tear-down:

Between S-Tires and added engine power, Tsuchiya-san was able to set an outright sector time record on the Gunsai Touge beating out cars like the Amuse S2000 and the RE Amemiya FD RX-7. It’s about time I got my AE86 back on the road.

Here’s another installment from Jay Leno’s first trip to Japan. Here he’s getting drifting lessons from The Drift King, Keiichi Tsuchiya. Even though Leno is probably the most famous car nut in the world, he sucks at drifting. The result is a pretty entertaining video. Jay almost puts the Toyota GT-86 into the wall twice. Keiichi has to pull the hand brake from the passenger seat at the end to purposely spin the car instead of crumpling it into a concrete wall.